Book of the Week: Flyboy in the Buttermilk
by Greg Tate

From Publishers Weekly
This collection of 40 essays on music, literature, art and politics confirms Tate's role as a chief progenitor of a New Black Aesthetic, what Gates calls "a body of creativity unfettered by the constraints of a nationalist party line." Consistently interesting, often brilliant, Tate--a staff writer for the Village Voice --modulates funkadelic street argot with a fierce intellect, taking on subjects as diverse as Miles Davis, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and Lee Atwater's embrace of black music. Reviewing the rap group Public Enemy, he observes, "To know PE is to love the agitprop (and artful noise) and to worry over the whack OK w-out comma?/no comma/pk retarded philosophy they espouse." Some music essays and a foray into hermeneutics may be heavy going for the uninitiated, but Tate skillfully enlivens writers like black SF fabulist Samuel Delany, and deftly criticizes essentialist curators who deny the "ambiguity and complexity" of black visual art. The political pieces cut to the bone, sparing neither a white power structure that devalues black life nor blacks who cry racism to excuse sexism; too many blacks, he says, "get more upset over being disrespected than they do over being disempowered."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Song of the Week: Summer Soft (Songs in the Key of Life)
by Stevie Wonder


Event of the Week: A Civil Rights Reader
by Daniel Bernard Roumain
featuring DBR & THE MISSION SQ UNIT
and DJ Scientific
Friday, Feb. 2, 7:30 p.m., Lied Center